In his Atheists: The Origin of the Species, Nick Spencer, the current
Research Director of the ‘theology think tank,’ Theos, takes up an
incredibly difficult undertaking: on one hand attempting to synthesize the
‘meaning’ of Atheism amid the noise and haste emanating from the
contemporary ‘New Atheism,’ while on the other, offering an evolutionary
perspective that traces the historical origins of ‘Atheism-in-general.’ With
the latter, he addresses the ‘myth’ that Atheism emerged in Europe within
the ‘teeth’ of brutal religious—Christian—opposition, through
the “services of reason, science and evolution” (xiv). This, he says,
overlooks the more rational idea that modern Atheism’s emergence was primarily a
“political and social cause,” its Western development the product of
reactions toward Theological authority, rather than as counter developments in science
or philosophy (xvi-xv). He summarizes this theory into three contentions: the history of
Atheism is best understood in political and social terms, which engender the notion that
rather than a singular ‘Atheism’ there exists instead a ‘family of
Atheisms,’ which is evinced by the ‘huge range’ of terminology
adopted, modified, and used over the last four centuries (xvii-xviii).

As such, his text is divided into four chapters—‘Possibilities,’
‘Pioneers,’ ‘Promises,’ and ‘Problems’—a
chronological and geographical ‘who’s who’ that maps the relative
lives and careers of characters across various stages both national and inter-national,
contextualized by epochs like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
modernity, and post-modernity. This ancestry speaks a language of immeasurable
ideologies, a dialogical gradient of ‘-isms’ that range from standard
identifiers like skepticism, humanism, agnosticism, or Atheism, to more broad
descriptors such as communism, determinism, existentialism, fatalism, materialism,
positivism, naturalism, rationalism, or secularism. In an equally deft and hurried
manner, Spencer weaves together these biographical snippets into a four-century
tapestry, highlighting the Atheism—or similar, often imputed philosophies—of
such figures like Lucretuis, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, D’Holbach,
Newton, Locke, Meslier, Hume, Jefferson, Hegel, Marx, Chernyshevsky, Diderot, Voltaire,
Shelley, Paine, Darwin, Freud, Holyoake, Bradlaugh, Nietzsche, Stalin, Darrow,
O’Hair, Khrushchev, Mao, Lenin, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

This survey of key players, which at times feels almost superficial, like pragmatic
name-dropping, creates a curtain call that, for his intentions, Spencer uses to support
his argument that ‘modern Atheism’ is, indeed, an evolved concept. Across
his four chapters these individuals represent a maturation of sorts, a step-by-step
progression leading toward a wider profile of Atheism-in-general. The concept seems to
then become a signifier imbued with like notions, wherein the ‘Atheist
trait’ develops into something genetically passed on, a mimetic peculiarity and
product of cultural adaptability that evolves according to its environment. This equally
accounts for the subtle similarities between different Atheisms: as the concept evolves,
its meaning grows from each previous derivation so that between the Atheisms of, say
Hobbes and Dawkins, we are able to perceive both similarity and difference. In this way,
we might say that his text is a successful analysis in that it provides the characters,
settings, and plot of an entity that represents a political or cultural migratory
construction.

On the other hand, Spencer’s text reveals a number of entirely problematic issues.
For example, we might ask whether it offers anything new at all, considering the
existence of a Cambridge Companion (Martin 2007) and Oxford
Handbook (Bullivant and Ruse, 2013), not to mention the available texts by
a myriad of others that equally provide both an historical examination of the
term’s usage, as well as a number of theoretical attempts at defining its broader
meaning. Which leads us to another issue. Because the study of Atheism is an emerging
field, and is thus fraught with the growing pains one might expect of adolescence, such
as its relationship to the larger study of religion, and the disparity between how
individuals describe themselves and how they are described by scholars, any in-depth
study of Atheism itself is, at present, a precarious endeavor. Which also means, because
it is not—necessarily—adding anything new, rather than resolving these
issues Spencer’s text seems to merely join in. In this way, it comes across as
less a clarification about the ‘vastness’ of Atheism, and more a simple
contribution, albeit wrapped within an account bulging at the seams with nuanced details
pragmatically left out.

More specifically, perhaps the most troubling revelation is that it seems written
for—or at least was inspired by—one man: Richard Dawkins. Yes, it might be a
truth universally acknowledged that there has been a ‘rise’ in Atheism since
Dawkins’ contribution to the four books that wholly encompass the canon of New
Atheism, but to shackle together a history of the concept just to point out that
Dawkins’ hatred of religion is merely an evolved version of something already
established, is troublingly—and perhaps too theologically—myopic. Maybe this
explains the sense one gets of the text’s generality, the way it feels short, like
a ‘Wikipedia’ style gloss of centuries of theoretical, philosophical, and
theological thought, quickly combined in order to remind Dawkins and his
‘allies’ that they are merely a product of a conceptual evolution. Or,
perhaps it also justifies his possible oversight in not recognizing his thesis as a
disguised form of Dawkins’ own meme theory—which he does not reference.

His focus on Dawkins, then, seems to be one of his text’s major downfalls,
exemplified perhaps most clearly by his bold statement: “New Atheism died with a
whimper rather than a bang” (253). This proclamation, when accompanied by his
conclusive statement, “Atheism is here to stay because God is back” (258),
seems to betray his true intentions, and thus diminish his text’s objectivity.
That is, and according to his own thesis, New Atheism should be categorized as an equal
product of the evolutionary progress he himself has traced across the body of his text.
It, just as the others, should be likewise perceived as a product of discourse, so that
rather than ‘dying’ it is seen as existing and thriving at a certain point
along a particular chronology, so as to provide an insight into how the key
players—such those cited above—contextually contribute to the larger meaning
of the species ‘Atheist.’ Yet, this seems not the case. Which causes us to
further consider: if Spencer had felt less required to counteract Dawkins’
‘war on religious belief,’ and focused his obvious talents on revealing New
Atheism as yet another discursive source with which we might better understand the
construction, development, and promotion of what it might mean, to particular
individuals, within particular contexts, to ‘be Atheist,’ then perhaps his
text would seem less like an ironic addition to the list he himself describes as
reacting within a revived ‘religious book market,’ and more like something
‘new.’